About of project:

Description

The future of small towns and rural areas directly depends on the work of local authorities and active community participation. Solving local development problems can lead to improved living standards across the country. The Project strategy is built on the area-based development approach (ABD), the essence of which is the identification of area-specific challenges through joint efforts of local authorities and communities.

The project aims at combining efforts and establishing partnerships between authorities and civil society to develop regions according to their specific requirements.

Intermediate Outcomes: The Project stakeholders are non-profit organizations, local authorities, businesses, active local leaders and community members.

To help local administrations of 118 districts of Belarus deal with local development planning and exercise citizen participation, the project:

- Carried out a wide-scale sociological survey “My District” to identify challenges that local people face

- Developed area-based development briefs for each district of Belarus to get the outlook of districts’ peculiarities, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

- Held trainings on building capacity in sustainable local development for local authorities and other interested citizens

Two contests of local initiatives have been organized to encourage active participation of local community members in sustainable development of their home districts. The local initiative support amounts to € 3,200,000.

After the 1-st Contest of Local Initiatives, 30 pilot districts have been selected to excersise ABD approach, and local action groups were created in each of these districts to keep the efforts sustainable.

1074 applications were submitted for the contests of local initiatives from the whole country, 212 of which acquired financial support.

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